Some Influences of the American Hookworm

Abstract

The term American hookworm is an adopted name for a parasite of the African natives that were brought to the Louisiana territory in the latter part of the 18th century. Hookworms first came into prominence in the early 1870's when the St. Gotthard Tunnel was being dug through the Alps Mountains. Workers suffered with a form of itch from penetrating hookworm larvae in the ever present mud. Many such infected workers left the tunnel and went to mines in Germany, where hookworms were seen in 1890 by an American Zoologist, Dr. Charles W. Stiles, who was studying in Leipzig. On Stiles' return to the United States in 1892, he lectured to medical students in the vicinity of Washington and cautioned them to be on the lookout for hookworms in the tropics or subtropics in cases of anemia in which the cause was not clear (Stiles, 1939). Later, one of the army medical students, Dr. Bailey K. Ashford, who had been sent to Puerto Rico, collected some hookworms from hospital patients which he, in 1900, determined to be the Old World hookworm, Ancylostoma duodenale. Soon afterward some hookworms from a Southern patient were examined by Stiles and found to be markedly unlike the Old World hookworm. It was to review briefly the importance of this hookworm, which is scarcely a half-inch in length, and to elaborate upon influences emanating from its presence in the Southern United States, that this paper was prepared.